


By Any Other Name

by A_Diamond



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Developing Relationship, Endearments, Fallen Angel Castiel (Supernatural), Human Castiel, Light Angst, M/M, Romantic Fluff, Sappy, Tumblr: deancas-sweetheart, coda? in the comments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-09
Updated: 2018-02-09
Packaged: 2019-03-15 22:03:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13622424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: Dean calls Casbabyandsweetheartanddarling, and he doesn’t understand why Cas only ever calls himDean. Until he does.





	By Any Other Name

He calls Cas _baby_ the first time they kiss, lips dry and faces damp with sweat. They meet across the vast emptiness of the Impala’s bench seat, finally closing the distance that’s been separating them for too many years. It’s the flush of victory, the thrill of the hunt, the frantic rush of another near-death experience that was a little too close to not being near. He pulls onto the gravel shoulder barely two miles from the smoking remains of a wight’s crypt, looks over at Cas, and he’s done.

He’s done denying, pretending, letting fear keep his hands to himself when he knows, he knows they’d be welcome if they reached out like they’ve always wanted to. Cas is right there, and he almost wasn’t, and he can’t live with himself if he lets that happen again without acting on this thing that lives between them.

So he does it. At long last, he brushes his fingers over Cas’s cheek, through his hair, and they’re trembling the entire time but nothing in his life has ever felt as right as when he draws Cas toward him and leans over to meet him halfway. Their lips catch and it’s like everything shifts and breaks and settles into a new world around them. An infinitely better world, fundamentally changed by a second’s contact between these two men in a classic car with a busted up front end on a strip of rocky dirt in the middle of nowhere.

They separate after it’s barely begun, just far enough that he can see Cas staring, mouth open, eyes so blue he’d swear there was still grace behind them. Breathing raggedly, shaking to the very core of him, he stares back. Between one heartbeat and another, Cas’s lashes sweep down and up; his voice cracks even though it’s just a whisper when he says, “Dean.”

“I know,” he tells Cas. Then he kisses him again, and again, and maybe they never stop except for him to say, “I know, baby, I know.”

He calls Cas _darling_ when the light is soft and warm and just as intimate as the space between them. He says it soft as the rising sun, dropping at the end. His voice is low and hushed, even though there’s no one else around to hear, because the air itself should be jealous of the way the name passes through it from his lips to Cas’s ear like a kiss. It’s for Cas and Cas alone, for the way it makes his always bright eyes light up and his mouth curve up to round out his cheeks.

Early mornings, shuffling across the floor in worn slippers and a dead man’s threadbare robe to claim the cup of coffee that’s already waiting for him, he drops a kiss on the back of Cas’s neck as he passes. “Thanks, darling,” he says, or, “Morning, darling,” or, “Sleep well, darling?”

No matter which it is, Cas always says, “Good morning, Dean,” and turns around to return the kiss to his lips before he takes the first sip. They share the drink in the quiet dawn, sitting side by side or standing shoulder to shoulder; Cas wakes with the sun as a matter of course, but he’s only up because no bed is comfortable enough to hold his interest for more than an hour or two when Cas has left it.

He’d rather be here, draining the dregs with his lips on the same stretch of the mug’s rim that Cas’s touched moments ago. Then he sets it down, starts making the slow and agonizing decision of what to make for breakfast and narrating his thoughts aloud while Cas crosses to the coffee pot to refill their cup.

“Hey, darling, how do you feel about waffles?”

He calls Cas a lot of things when they fight: _dumbass_ , _fucking idiot_ , _useless_ , and, cruelest of all, _angel_. They fight a lot, still. Mostly it’s arguments about one or the other of them being too reckless on a hunt, like one or the other of them always is, but once it’s started it spins out into every wrong they’ve ever done to each other and that list—no matter how good they try to be to and for each other now, that list is endless and keeps on growing.

Whatever started this fight, and he really doesn’t even remember anymore, it’s long since moved past that. “What more do I need to sacrifice for you, Dean?” drowns out every other thought in his mind, battering over him again and again with the echo of how thick Cas’s voice was, full of all the wrong emotions.

He did that, and he does it again, compounds his crime by reacting with the same instinct that always lets him come up swinging no matter how hard or how far he’s been thrown. Cas sends him reeling so he hits back, unremorseful until it’s too late:

“I’m so sorry, angel, that it’s such a fucking sacrifice to be stuck with me.”

He calls Cas _sweetheart_ in the gentle evenings, curling together in bed after a long day, head on Cas’s chest. Listening to Cas’s heartbeat, feeling Cas’s chest rise and fall with breaths under his cheek, is terrifying and reassuring all at once. Cas is human, breakable; can die, and has even made some pretty serious attempts at doing so as if just to prove the point.

Part of him, a large part on the days when he’s had to hold and patch Cas up, would give anything to be able to press Cas’s grace back beneath too-fragile skin just to protect him from this terrible, dangerous life they live. A smaller part of his mind, those same nights, whispers that there are better ways to protect both of them, but they tried that and they can’t. He and Cas, they aren’t made for civilian life; or if they were, they lost the knack for it too long ago to get it back.

But the trade-off for that fragility is that Cas is here for good, his own man, not beholden to anyone or anything else; Cas had made the choice to stay with him, even before they became what they are now. Before he let them become what they are now, because it was always there, always trying to be, and he just had to let it. Let Cas.

It doesn’t matter, really, those nights when he can’t stop the knowledge that Cas’s heart will one day stop beating from overwhelming him. Because this is what Cas wants: humanity, pain, hunger, falling asleep with their bodies pressed together and waking up even closer.

Cas wraps an arm around his back, spreads the other hand to lace their fingers together, washes peace and warmth over his entire body just by murmuring, “Good night, Dean.”

“Night, sweetheart,” he offers back with a kiss to the center of Cas’s chest.

He calls Cas _honey_ in public when he’s looking to cause trouble. Someone looks at them sideways, grimaces when they sit too close, and he raises his voice and widens his smile and lays it on thick as he can without laughing too hard and giving the game away.

Cas doesn’t join in, but he plays along; tolerates Dean’s over-the-top fawning with good humor and the slightest hint of something too solemn to be mischief tugging the edge of his mouth up. The words and actions may be exaggerated, but the feeling behind them is nothing but genuine, so when he scoots over on the shared bench seat until he’s all but sitting in Cas’s lap, or slings his arm around Cas’s shoulders and plants an overly showy kiss on his cheek, the smile he gets in return is real and warm and happy.

The open display of affection isn’t just for the benefit of whoever’s watching, either. It took them long enough to get to this point, for him to be comfortable with this kind of contact, that he knows what it looks like when Cas is feeling lonely and isolated despite right next to him. It broke his heart every time, and every time he promised he’d do better, but he didn’t always. He tries to make up for it now, to prove he’s not ashamed or afraid of their relationship; not only to the judgmental world, but to Cas.

He makes eye contact with the three middle-aged, small-town folk glaring at them from a corner booth. Drags it out, one after the other, makes sure they all know he knows what they’re staring at, what they’re thinking, and that he’s not about to let any of it ruin his day. Then he lifts Cas’s hand from the table in both of his, presses his mouth to the palm for no reason other than that he can and it will make Cas smile at him.

“I like this place, honey,” he declares, brash and too loud, looking around the dime-a-dozen diner like it’s something special. “We should come here more, don’t you think?”

He calls Cas _gorgeous_ , _mine_ , _so good_ , _perfect_ , _love_. He whispers them, groans them, sobs them. He kisses and licks and bites them into Cas’s thighs. Lets his voice crack with them when his lips gasp open and wanting next to Cas’s ear.

The first time they make love, it’s in his bed and he barely says a word as he traces the lines of Cas’s body with lips and fingertips, maps the sensitive places of his lover’s mortal flesh. Cas makes noise enough for both of them, soft but constant, hitching breaths and wondering moans that urge him on.

It’s a slow unwinding for both of them. Cautious, gentle, finding each other past too many years of defenses. Cas lets go easy and sweet, falls apart under his care until all he can say is, “Dean, Dean, Dean.”

He doesn’t follow just yet; not until Cas’s breath comes steady again and they’ve traded places on the bed, so he’s lying back and Cas is over him, working down his body with such tender focus that the world could try to end at any moment and neither of them would care enough to notice. It’s then, with Cas’s mouth hot and wet against the jut of his hip bone, that he breaks down. Curls his fingers in Cas’s hair, “Love, oh, love,” falling from his lips as easily as tears slip down his cheeks.

Cas only ever calls him _Dean_. _Goodnight, Dean_ , Cas says when they’re going to sleep. _Good morning, Dean_. He’s _Dean_ when Cas shakes with rage so profound it’s impossible to forget the man was once an angel. _Dean_ when he’s inside Cas, when Cas is inside him, when their hands are roaming over each other so desperately that he can’t keep track of whose are doing what any longer.

For the span of the month between when he notices and when he figures it out, this hurts him. It’s a small ache, but the kind that lingers. The kind he’ll never mention, because it makes him feel smaller than he really is, and it makes it sound like he thinks what they have is smaller, for a thing like that to matter. It’s nothing, less than, compared to what they had to go through to get here. It’s nothing compared to the pain he knows he caused Cas by waiting so long, and that’s the other reason that he doesn’t say anything.

Even when they’re fighting and he throws every resentment he has behind the goal of hurting Cas, he keeps it to himself. It rises up his throat like bile, chokes him along with all the other bitter, sour doubts, but this one he holds back. This one, he worries, would hurt him more than it would Cas.

He’s not good with words, a lot of the time. He doesn’t usually try to be. But the words he uses for Cas, those are important; there’s meaning to every endearment, volumes of emotion and affection contained inside each, and those matter to him. Every time he calls Cas _baby, darling,_ even _honey_ , he opens his heart and bares his soul and it’s worth it because he knows Cas can hear his love in it.

The day that he figures it out, he finds himself awake before Cas or the sun and unusually well-rested, so much so that he decides against shoving his face back into the pillows and rouses himself to take on Cas’s morning ritual instead. Mind drifting, lazy with the ease of the early morning with a worn robe around his shoulders and a hot mug of coffee in his hands, he doesn’t hear Cas until he feels him, warm against his back.

Lips brush his neck, arms wrap around him, Cas nuzzles his ear and says, “Good morning, Dean,” and an epiphany lights up his soul.

“Darling?” he asks, voice as steady as he can keep it when all the rest of him is trembling just as much as that very first time, the shattering moment when he gave himself over to the bond between them.

“Yes, Dean?”

It’s there again in the way Cas says his name. He never heard it before; doesn’t know how he missed it for so long now that he does. All the things he means when he says _love_ or _sweetheart_ , the layers of depth wrapped up in a single word—that’s how Cas says it. And maybe he didn’t notice because he wasn’t listening at the right time. He was listening for a change, for Cas to call him something new and affectionate like he’d started to do.

But Cas just calls him by his name. He says _Dean_ like there’s no other name that could contain the multitudes encompassed by it. Cas says his name the same way he always has, and it sets his world spinning faster every time.


End file.
